Latest opinions that Alex Noble has shared on Finextra

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Alex Noble

Account Director

McAfee

Member since

10 Jan 2008

Location

London

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Alex's opinions

Wells Fargo: Can video help avoid disability discrimination?

I was amazed by the report that Wells Fargo has ended up paying $16m for failing to provide phone services for deaf customers. Part of the amazement is that in the UK phone services for hearing impaired customers are well established and well used by large companies. In the UK, nearly all banks offer a textphone service and there are well establi

27 June 2011 /retail Innovation in Financial Services

Is video finally here for bank branch and contact centres?

For as long as I have worked in financial services IT (and some time before), video has been trumpeted as the "next big thing" for retail financial services but has not taken off as predicted. Yet I wonder if this solution that Bank of Moscow has rolled out and the news week before of Bank of America is piloting video for wealth managem...

08 March 2011 /retail

Where did it go wrong for the Barclays branches?

It was a surprise last week for me to see the news that Barclays was to sack 1,000 Financial Advisors from their branch network. It’s a while now since I last worked on bank branch IT, but when I did (only four years ago) the focus was very much around replacing old branch systems and enabling branch as a sales channel. The market was full of soft...

31 January 2011 /retail

Voice biometric security after the UK DWP ends trials

An interesting story last month on Silicon.com, that the UK Department of Work & Pensions has abandoned its trials of voice biometrics as an anti-fraud tool.This is not a snap decision, as Silicon.com reports that the DWP has spent at least £2.4m on trials since May 2007. This is one of the largest payment organisation’s in the UK, so its dec...

02 December 2010 /security /retail

Instant Messaging and its strange survival in B2C banking

The BBC News website had a great article last week on the slow but steady decline of Instant Messaging. It was not so long ago that Instant Messaging (IM) was seen as the tool that would replace e-mail. Some technology players still think this might happen (think of Google Wave, for example) but the majority now view IM as a technology that has...

07 June 2010 /retail

The long-term trends behind the RBS job losses

It's always sad to see job losses on this scale and (if it's correct) the Finextra calculation that Royal Bank of Scotland has cut 22,600 jobs since the crisis began, helps provide an indication of the human cost of the banking crisis. The problem is that while popular anger at senior banking mangers is in many cases justified, most of those who a...

10 May 2010 /retail

Biometrics, cost and password resets

An interesting story about Bank Leumi on Finextra just before Christmas. It seems that Bank Leumi will be using voice biometrics for password re-sets for online banking. There are a couple of interesting things about this. The first is that password re-sets are an absolute pain for helpdesks and similar types of contact centre. Depending on whet...

05 January 2010 /security /retail

Man in the middle fraud in call centres

Never one to post only on up to the minute stories, the blog was quite interested in the Finextra report a fortnight ago on "man in the middle" fraud in call centres. I just haven't had a chance to write on it until now. Traditionally, man in the middle fraud has been more associated more with the web channel than the telephone channel...

27 July 2009 /security /retail

Contact Centre impersonation arrives in the UK

I wrote yesterday on the problems the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was having with a phishing attack that caused customers to call a fake contact centre that impersonated the bank's centre and captured their credit card details ("Phishing fraud steps up a new level with fake bank IVR & contact centre"). It now seems that this frau...

05 June 2009 /security /retail

Phishing at a new level with a fake bank contact centre

I normally focus the blog on Europe, but this story from Australia shows a very alarming new level of fraud. In this case fraudsters have targeted Commonwealth Bank of Australia customers with a fake IVR and call centre. The story ( fully available at APCmag.com here ) is very worrying. It shows that fraudsters are graduating from e-mail phishing...

04 June 2009 /security /retail

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